Trail of Footprints: A History of Indigenous Maps from Viceregal Mexico (Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas)

In colonial Mexico, maps made by native Mixtec, Nahua, and Zapotec painters played important roles in defining spatial boundaries—helping to assign land for agriculture, ranching, mining, and subsistence farming—and as evidence in legal disputes. Provincial bureaucrats, notaries, and imperial authorities used the maps to assess natural resources, geography, political organization, and regional history, while intellectuals collected and studied them for their historic value. Even a century or two after their making, indigenous maps continued to inform disputes, circulating in town councils, notarial workshops, and judicial archives, and they found their way into the personal papers of prominent indigenous leaders across the region. In Trail of Footprints, Alex Hidalgo investigates how Spanish, indigenous, and mixed-race communities in Oaxaca used mapmaking to negotiate the allocation of land. He begins with the patrons who commissioned the maps, analyzing the purposes for which they required mapmaking, and links them to the indigenous mapmakers, who often served as intermediaries between their own communities and the Spanish. Hidalgo then probes the material dimensions of the maps themselves to recover a body of knowledge centered on the transformation of plants and inorganic matter into working components. He concludes by tracing the afterlife of the maps, many of which were moved and traded until they were acquired for the private collections of scholars and historians, who repurposed them to recount the past rather than negotiate the present. "Trail of Footprints offers an intimate glimpse into the commission, circulation, and use of indigenous maps from colonial Mexico. A collection of sixty largely unpublished maps from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and made in the southern region of Oaxaca anchors an analysis of the way ethnically diverse societies produced knowledge in colonial settings. Mapmaking, proposes Hidalgo, formed part of an epistemological shift tied to the negotiation of land and natural resources between the region's Spanish, Indian, and mixed-race communities. The craft of making maps drew from social memory, indigenous and European conceptions of space and ritual, and Spanish legal practices designed to adjust spatial boundaries in the New World. Indigenous mapmaking brought together a distinct coalition of social actors--Indian leaders, native towns, notaries, surveyors, judges, artisans, merchants, muleteers, collectors, and painters--who participated in the critical observation of the region's geographic features. Demand for maps reconfigured technologies associated with the making of colorants, adhesives, and paper that drew from Indian botany and experimentation, trans-Atlantic commerce, and Iberian notarial culture. The maps in this study reflect a regional perspective associated with Oaxaca's decentralized organization, its strategic position amidst a network of important trade routes that linked central Mexico to Central America, and the ruggedness and diversity of its physical landscape"--Publisher's description Trail of Footprints offers an intimate glimpse into the commission, circulation, and use of indigenous maps from colonial Mexico. A collection of one hundred, largely unpublished, maps from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries made in the southern region of Oaxaca, anchors an analysis of the way ethnically diverse societies produced knowledge in colonial settings. Mapmaking, proposes Hidalgo, formed part of an epistemological shift tied to the negotiation of land and natural resources between the region’s Spanish, Indian, and mixed-race communities. The craft of making maps drew from social memory, indigenous and European conceptions of space and ritual, and Spanish legal practices designed to adjust spatial boundaries in the New World. Indigenous mapmaking brought together a distinct coalition of social actors—Indian leaders, native towns, notaries, surveyors, judges, artisans, merchants, muleteers, collectors, and painters—who participated in the critical observation of the region’s geographic features. Demand for maps reconfigured technologies associated with the making of colorants, adhesives, and paper that drew from Indian botany and experimentation, trans-Atlantic commerce, and Iberian notarial culture. The maps in this study reflect a regional perspective associated with Oaxaca’s decentralized organization, its strategic position amidst a network of important trade routes that linked central Mexico to Central America, and the ruggedness and diversity of its physical landscape. This study explores how postconquest Mexican indigenous communities used maps to defend prized lands, to create a visual and social history of life before the Spanish, and to record knowledge of pre-Columbian plants. IllustrationsNotes on TranslationAcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter 1. PatronsChapter 2. PaintersChapter 3. MaterialsChapter 4. AuthenticationEpilogue. AfterlifeNotesBibliographyIndex